why did this payments deficit occur? dr. joan spero, senior vice-president, corporate affairs at american express. a payments deficit emerged in the late 1960s for three fundamental reasons. the u.s. economy was heating up due to the war in vietnam and due to expenditures on the gat society, and had inflaon at home. as the dollar became overvalued, we began to suck in more imports and we began to export less in relation to imports. so we went into "balance of trade" deficit, finally, in 1971. and the third factor is the capital outflows from the u.s., which continued throughout the 1960s for investment reasons and for financial flows. schoumacher: where a decade before there had been an international dollar shortage, now the world faced a dollar glut. this overwhelming supply of dollars piled up in the vaults of foreign central banks. these banks began to redeem dollars for american gold. between 1964 and 1966, u.s. gold reserves dropped by $2 billion. e u.s. really d not know what to do about the dollar in the late 1960s, a